Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Field Notes from a Catastrophe – Review
Field Notes From a Catastrophe’ is Elizabeth Kolbert’s masterpiece of conciseness and clarity possibly explaining recent climate change science and the political obstacles (read the US, Republicans, and Bush Administration in leading order) to finally getting serious about attacking the problem. Originally published in 2005, the paperback version has an afterword written in 2006. Kolbert takes a journalist’s approach to possibly explaining the climate change phenomenon (the book created as a series in the New Yorker). She takes the reader to Shishmaref, Alaska an island village quickly becoming an weak place to live due to climate-induced sea ice changes, to the North Slope, to the large Greenland ice shield and she brings the story down to a individual scale. Kolbert also leads the reader through the knowledge of global warming effectively making understandable seemingly esoteric topics like “dangerous anthropogenic interference” (DAI), which is basically the point where something truly major goes haywire. Kolbert brings the joy of currently learning to the reader, until one ponders the potential consequences of what she lays out for us. Perhaps generally disturbing is the evidence she marshals that the climate has already changed. For example, the climate has warmed sufficiently to allow various butterfly species to migrate to new previously too remote locations and to cause the death of individual frog species. Scientists do not, of course, understand everything about climate change (indeed, it is in the very kind of science that an endpoint of full knowledge is never achieved). Those political and monetary forces (primarily in the United States) that benefit from the status quo latch on to the uncertainties to create doubt among the public and forestall action. Her interviews with Bush administration officials strike an strange note – they stonewall with robotic incantations. While Europe and most of modern world has acted, the US has dithered, delayed, and initially denied. Kolbert explains why scientists decide that it is virtually certain that under the current business as usual’ approach, greenhouse gas concentrations will reach a level that causes massive coastal flooding, larger scale extinctions, and crop failures starting to starvation (DAI). These outcomes will not be uniformly distributed and are likely to fall heaviest on the poorest countries. Scientists do not, however, know what degree of greenhouse gas concentration will cause these impacts. The Bush administration uses that uncertainty as a reason to do essentially nothing and Congress too has ultimately failed to force any action. Kolbert’s book moves the reader to search out even more modern information (NOAA’s Arctic Change web site is one reliable source). And the news is alarming. This stuff is not just a tree hugger’s paranoid delusion: total heating is really happening, it is actually happening now, and it is finally getting worse faster than highly anticipated. Kolbert’s book is a piece of journalism (and given the rapidly changing reality, journalism is probably the greatest resource of information) that informs on both the science and the policy of climate change without stridently hectoring the reader. Kolbert presents the facts. The reader would have to be a lower bulb indeed not to get the picture. Absolutely the very main recommendation. Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe deserves further than 5 stars.